Sunday, June 04, 2006

Adjusting The Guitar Nut

This is one of those sticky adjustments on your guitar that is a pain to get just right. Check this out:

An Alternative Way To Adjust Your Guitar Nut

By: Andrew Preston

Most new guitars arrive from the factory with the nut justbarely playable. Older guitars may have the nut filed or worndown so much that fret buzz cannot be eliminated by neck orstring height adjustment. If you have a new guitar, or you arereplacing the nut with a new one, here is an alternative methodto file and adjust the nut material to make your guitar playlike the professionals guitars play.

Before adjusting anything, make sure your guitar is strung upcorrectly and that your neck is straight and not bowed orwarped. If your neck is bowed you first need to adjust the trussrod. If your neck is warped it will require a more extensiverepair. For the lowest possible action or to avoid fret buzz allacross your finger board it may be necessary to have your fretsleveled and crowned first.

You will need a set of nut files (available from StewartMacDonald), and a good set of feeler gauges as well. Differentgrades of sandpaper are very useful too.

Fret each string individually, starting with the High E, betweenthe second and third fret, use your feeler gauge to check theamount of space between the bottom of the string and the firstfret. You should have approximately .005" of space between eachone, with the string barely touching the second fret. If thismeasurement is close or dead on then move on to the next stringright up to the Low E string. You may want to record the gap ona scrap piece of paper as you move across the fret board, to seethe nut slot's height in relation to the fret board as you do so.

For most players a string height (also known in guitar slang as"action") of 3/64" of an inch is considered normal. Some playerschoose a higher sting height such as 4/64" of an inch whileplayers which tend to have a light touch and want the fastestaction possible strive to lower the action as close as possibleto 2/64" which in many case's is very hard to setup and maintainwithout fret buzzing somewhere on the finger board.

Of course, you can use the traditional method to set your stringheight in relation to the nut, by using multiple feeler gaugesbelow the nut, and filing down to the factory depth and width.However, I have found this method to provide a better and moreconsistent feel while playing near the nut.

About the author:Andrew Preston is a professional guitar session player anddabbles in part time guitar repair. Your can see moreinformation at GuitarSavant